Precious

by Precious Williams

  At Fernmere Grammar, which is in fact the local comprehensive, there are only two other black kids – one of them’s fostered over in Petworth, the other one lives at a nearby childrens’ home. Being Fernmere blacks they’re not what you’d call authentic. Like me, they’re well versed in playing the ‘please accept me’ game; a game that’s about subtly hating yourself and silently apologising all the time. And if you don’t play the game, white people will write you off as threatening. The key to surviving in Fernmere, when you’re black, is making whites believe that deep down you wish you were white yourself.

  I’m growing up. I’m absolutely full of myself, I’m told, which I think is a good thing. I’ve always had opinions. But now, for reasons I think have to do with me recently devouring Their Eyes Were Watching God, I’m speaking up. Sometimes.

  Wendy and Nanny say I’m growing out of control; that I’m growing more and more unbearable every day. The two of them bring out baby pictures of me and say, ‘Wish you were still like that, eh?’ holding them up to me as though holding garlic up in the face of a vampire.

  The summer I turn sixteen we go to Hayling Island where we rent a beach-front house. Me, Nanny, Wendy, Mick, Kelly and Andrew. I buy a black hat with a wide brim from Tammy Girl and I wear it nearly every day of the holiday. I even wear it when I plunge into the choppy sea.

  ‘I don’t know how you can go about like that in that hat. It’s like you want to look different from everyone else,’ Wendy says. ‘Don’t you wanna just fit in? We’ve done everything to make you blend in. I don’t understand how you could do that. Wear a hat when no one else is wearing one, for no reason.’

  ‘She’s tryin’ to look like that Mel and Kim,’ says Mick.

  On the second-to-last day of our holiday, we go on a family trip to Havant Hypermarket where I pick up a copy of a magazine it’s rare to find outside of London, Black Beauty & Hair. I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Mick’s Ford Escort, flicking through the magazine, running my eyes over the glossy lips and glossy hair-dos.

  ‘Black beauty and bloody hair. What’s all that then?’ says Mick, trying to peek at the shiny pages. ‘Why’re you tryin’ to be something you’re not, then?’

  Mick’s the one who actually paid for the magazine after Wendy coaxed him into treating me. So why’s he complaining?

  ‘I’ll do what I want,’ I say. ‘I’ll wear what I want.’

  ‘You’re getting ever so arrogant, Neet,’ says Wendy. ‘Just like your mother.’

  ‘Good.’

  On our final afternoon at Hayling Island, a white woman perched not far from us on the pebbly beach asks me, ‘How did you get your hair so damn curly?’

  ‘It grows like that doesn’t it, Neet?’ says Wendy. ‘It’s not easy to look after it, poor kid. We’ve been all over the place trying to find the right products.’

  ‘I love my hair actually,’ I say suddenly. ‘White people are allowed to like their hair just the way it is. Why shouldn’t I?’

  Wendy stares at me and I put my black hat back on, get up from our beach blanket and tiptoe into the sea.

  Driving home from Hayling Island, Nanny and I get as far as Chichester before there is an explosion. Ever since she had to have stomach surgery when she was in her forties, Nanny’s bowels have caused her problems. When she’s nervous, like she is driving on the motorway today, Nanny’s bowels grow irritated; to her horror and embarrassment, there are rare occasions when she can’t quite make it to the toilet in time.

  The diarrhoea smell lingers, even with the car windows open. Nanny sits there stoically. She doesn’t make eye contact.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she says.

  I turn and look through the window, fighting back tears.

  Nanny pats my arm.

  I turn to her, and have an explosion of my own.

  ‘I hate this,’ I sob. ‘It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. I hate you.’

  Nanny is silent for a long time.

  ‘After all I’ve done for you, Nin,’ she says, eventually. ‘I’ve been your biggest defender. All these years.’

  ‘I’m just sick of this,’ I sob.

  ‘And I’m sick of you,’ says Nanny, her voice dangerously low. ‘I’m sick of your little outbursts, you spiteful, ungrateful little bitch. I spent all of my savings on you, on that court case. And nothing’s ever good enough for you, is it?’

  ‘It’s your fault! You’re the one who took me away from my mother.’

  ‘Took you away from your mother?’ Nanny spits. ‘Took you away from your mother? Don’t you go getting any delusions about her: that woman didn’t want you, Nin. She threw you away like a piece of rubbish. She advertised you in a magazine. She never even liked you, Nin.’

  ‘She’s my mother! It’s your fault she won’t have anything to do with me!’

  ‘There’s only one person in this world who’s ever been a mother to you, my girl. Here was I thinking I was doing something nice for a little girl who needed me,’ says Nanny, weeping. ‘And you go and throw it all in my face.’

  She may not think much of my personality these days, but Nanny’s confident I’ll sail through my O Levels. I can’t imagine why. My English teacher may well call me ‘extraordinarily skilful and colourful’ but the rest of my teachers have all but written me off, using phrases like ‘scatty’, ‘in a dream-like state’ and ‘obviously very able but idle’ in my school reports. Plus I regularly forge Nanny’s signature on sick notes and bunk off school so that I can sit alone in the town library, staring into space, daydreaming, pretending to be revising.

  My O Level results, when they arrive, stun everybody except Nanny and perhaps Wendy. I’ve passed all eight exams: I got As in English Language and in English Literature; Bs in the humanities. I can’t help wondering whether the examinations board has assigned somebody else’s results to my name in error.

  Here’s Mick, carrying his snooker cue, looming out of the darkness like an apparition, his shoulders stooped forward as he saunters across the road. He sees me loitering by the entrance to the Duck Pond, spotlit by a street lamp.

  ‘Hark at the state of you!’ he says. ‘All done up like that! Where you off to then?’

  I’m wearing a purple bat-wing jumper and matching eyeshadow with a pale violet rah-rah skirt and electric blue leather-look ankle boots.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I say.

  ‘What you doin’ then, little idiot? Walkin’ around in the dark on your own?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to.’

  ‘Walk down the town with me, then.’

  Mick’s on his way to the pub to play in a tournament. We take a shortcut around the Duck Pond, towards the centre of the town. There is silence, aside from the eerie rustle of the ducks passing through the foliage.

  Mick says, ‘Why are you always lookin’ so miserable lately then? I heard you passed all your exams and that – what’s the matter with you? Those racialist pillocks been picking on you again then at school?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes. But it’s not that’, I say and I begin to cry. ‘It’s just that I haven’t heard from my mother or Agnes for four whole years. I don’t even know my own mother’s address or phone number. Why doesn’t anybody love me, Mick?’

  ‘All of us love you, don’t we?’ says Mick. ‘You knows we do.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Course you do.’

  ‘I really hate my life.’

  ‘I dunno why you always seems to expect so much out of life, Neeta. I hate my bloody life as well, Neet, but there’s no use keep complainin’ about it.’

  Precious

  NANNY CALLS ON HER clever grown-up son, Uncle Dave, to take me out for a cup of tea and talk to me about my career choices. Uncle Dave has a degree, a good job and a four-bedroom, detached house. He was even a graduate student once. So he must know what he’s on about.

  ‘My English teacher’s said I’ve got what it takes to be a reporter
or an author,’ I blurt out. Then I want to kick myself for seeming arrogant. Uncle Dave smiles at me fondly. He says, ‘Look, love, we know you’d like to pursue something creative. But those types of jobs don’t grow on trees. It can be very difficult to get your foot in the door.’

  Uncle Dave talks to me about the possibility of going to college or university and then beginning as a secretary or PA within a media company. I sit there thinking ‘I’m going to become a writer and nobody – not even you – can stop me.’ I cock my head as if acquiescing and I silently I decide to do exactly what Uncle Dave’s just said I can’t do; I’ll get my size seven foot in the door just like that, thanks.

  After my chat with Uncle Dave I ring up the Fernmere Observer, ask to speak to the editor, tell her about my O Level results and offer my services as a trainee reporter. The editor’s voice bubbles with amusement. She tells me I’m welcome to apply for unpaid work experience during the holidays, and she warns me that to become a journalist, I’ll need A Levels ‘at least’. Which is why I sign up to take three of them, at Chichester College of Technology.

  I presume Chichester Tech will be a cross between a funfair and a university campus. That I’ll hang out with new friends in an oak-panelled canteen, discussing Charles Dickens and Maya Angelou and my brand-new love, hip-hop. But this is not to be. I spot only one black student. His blue overalls and the tool-box he carries suggest he’s studying Construction. I try to strike up a conversation with him and he walks straight past me, avoiding eye contact.

  My A Level English class is mainly made up of local Sloanes from Chichester and Lavant. Several of them are alumni of Lavant House, the girls’ boarding school where Mick’s mum works as a dinner lady. They hate hip-hop and they love miserable old Morrissey. Most of them have never spoken to a black person before in their lives. Worse still, they seem to live to take the piss out of the few council-estate dwellers audacious enough to have enrolled for A Level English.

  I make an earnest effort to blend in with the Sloanes – by immediately pretending not to live on a council estate. Poppy and Flora and Tabitha and Pippa seem neither to like nor dislike me. They watch me closely, like I’m someone who can’t necessarily be trusted and I watch them just as closely. I notice how they constantly sweep back their shoulder-length manes and how they all wear the same uniform of faded Levi 501s, white T-shirts, leather penny loafers, Benetton sweaters and blue or red paisley bandanas. I wonder if it’s time to throw away my rah-rah skirts.

  Eventually I grow so sick of not fitting in again that I write to Black Beat International magazine, asking for pen pals. My letter says, ‘I’m a Nigerian girl fostered by white people in a West Sussex village and I’m looking for pen pals who can give me information about my cultural background.’

  As I read through what I’ve just written I feel for the first time a sense of rage about my history, about the unanswered questions it presents. A single, angry word percolates then erupts up into my irritated mind: Why?

  Why was it deemed OK for this to become my story? Why does it make the news when a little white girl is molested or beaten or neglected, when in my case it didn’t even make anybody raise an eyebrow or demand an investigation? And why, if I had to be fostered at all, did it have to happen in such a makeshift way and in all-white West Sussex?

  My letter’s published in Black Beat International and I receive more than fifty replies, including a parcel from Lagos containing a voluminous scarlet and gold wax-print kaftan.

  A fifty-year-old man from Ghana writes, ‘I want you to know Anita Williams that your people here in Africa love you and I really feel for you after reading your wonderful letter in a magazine. I am sure your parents love you too and are longing for your touch.’

  I soon have thirty pen pals, forming a link to something that feels very far away from me and yet essential to my survival: a black community.

  Mick finds a plastic and wood-veneer record player in the Lost & Found cupboard at the Grange, the leisure centre where he works as caretaker. He presents it to me as a gift, to cheer me up. I begin to spend evenings hiding from Nanny, shut inside my bedroom, dancing around to the tinny sounds of my record player, listening to Stetsasonic and Masta Ace, the Cookie Crew and the Wee Papa Girls. Hip-hop captures my imagination and delights and nourishes me in a way no other medium ever has, or could, or ever will. Hip-hop burns away my apathy, to an extent. And it’s my own discovery. Discovered via reading Black Beat International, the magazine no one else in Fernmere reads, the one the newsagent orders especially for me.

  I picture them – black guys and black girls from the New York projects, standing on street corners, rattling off riveting rhymes, just like that. MC Shan. Kurtis Blow. LL Cool J. Roxanne Shante. Thrusting themselves into verbal duels, street-battles, the likes of which haven’t been seen or heard since Shakespeare. Like Mercutio battling Tybalt. And these black men and women, these street poets, they don’t even need to write their shit down. It’s like their stories, words and verses are tattooed into their consciousness.

  I sleep wearing headphones and spend all of my wages from my part-time waitressing job at Our Price, foregoing new clothes to own the latest US import LPs.

  One night, just before Christmas, the Sloanes surprise me by asking me to hang out with them at the Hole In The Wall pub. I’m flattered, but there’s a problem: the last bus home to Fernmere leaves Chichester at 8.30 p.m. and since the journey’s twelve miles, it’s too far to walk. But then Mick, who’s recently learned to drive, says, ‘Go on, go out with your mates. I don’t mind drivin’ in and picking you up.’

  And so I finally have a social life. The Sloanes still know nothing about hip-hop but it’s someone to go around with, isn’t it? It’s something to do. And so, every Thursday or Friday night I knock back pint after pint of cider with the Sloanes in the Hole In The Wall, then I ring Mick, who drives me home to Nanny, who’ll hiss, ‘Don’t think I can’t smell the alcohol on your breath you sneaky little bitchie.’

  One evening Poppy asks, ‘Who’s that, like, middle-aged white guy who picked you up the other night in a blue car?’

  I’m certainly not about to reveal to these Sloanes that I’m a foster-kid who lives on a council estate.

  ‘He’s, like, my uncle,’ I say. ‘His name’s Mick.’

  The Sloanes immediately christen him ‘Cruising Capri Mick’ – even though my Mick drives a Ford Escort, not a Ford Capri. They say Mick reminds them of the stereotypical boy-racer who has fluffy dice dangling in front of his car windscreen and Go Faster stripes running down the sides of his car.

  I try to see Mick through their eyes: his nicotine-yellowed fingers, the way he sits in his battered Ford Escort smoking rollies and smiling mysteriously to himself through his car window. I laugh along with them but secretly I despise them for mocking him. I love Cruising Capri Mick who’s more like a father to me every day. He’s interested in my life and he’s amused by my posh new friends.

  ‘Who was that stuck-up little blonde then?’ he says one evening. ‘That that Poppy you keep goin’ on about, is it then?’ He peers quickly at his reflection in the mirror. ‘These stuck-up birds like a bit of rough, don’t they?’ Mick laughs at his own reflection and I laugh too.

  ‘You like it at college then do you?’ he says.

  ‘No. Not really. Why?’

  ‘Just asking. You still listening to that rap music crap then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can understand what they’re going on about. Must be some kind of black thing then, is it?’

  ‘They’re rapping in secret code,’ I say. ‘They’re rapping about how much they want to kill all white people.’

  We both crack up laughing.

  I’m at the Hole In The Wall with a small bottle of gin tucked in the pocket of my new black bomber jacket. I’m with Pippa and four of the other Sloanes and we’re on our way to a nightclub called Thursday’s which is three miles outside of Chichester, in a village called O
ving.

  I am being chatted up by a man who looks old, old, old; he’s got to be at least twenty-five, even thirty. The man keeps buying me drinks even though I’m already drunk.

  He’s a soldier at the army barracks in Chichester and he seems to have money galore. I don’t fancy him at all but he’s clearly interested in me and I’m kind of enjoying flirting with him. I’m trying on ‘sexy’. It’s unlike me to flirt. But suddenly it is making me feel powerful to be desired, even if the person doing the desiring looks like a cross between Freddie Mercury and Bruce Forsyth.

  Poppy taps me on the shoulder.

  ‘Stay away from that squaddie,’ she whispers. ‘He’s married, and he’s a right old lech.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I say.

  I wonder whether Poppy’s just jealous because I’m being chatted up by a mature, sophisticated dude.

  The squaddie tells me his name and I instantly forget it. He tells me a joke that I don’t get. Something about a girl taking it up the arse.

  ‘Let me buy you another drink,’ he says.

  The gin has unlocked a new version of me, confident and full of herself. I’ve only ever drunk Diamond White, white wine or Bulmers cider before. I knock back more gin and watch myself becoming a different person. Throwing my head back, laughing when his jokes aren’t all that funny.

  The Sloanes make up excuses to leave for Thursday’s without me. I know why: I’m a liability. I look young for my age and I’m the only one in our posse of sixteen-year-olds who doesn’t have fake ID.